Crap jobs? Tell me about it

Crap Jobs, the companion piece to the Idler magazine's Crap Towns, is - as you might expect from the Ronseal-esque quality of the title - a collection of tales of woe from the more disgruntled section of the waged populace. The database builder, the traffic counter, the sandwich filler and others burdened with such modern Sisyphean tasks all get a chance to vent their spleens, and rightly so. But as a connoisseur of crap jobs, I must take up the sword on their behalf and point out that with just a little effort one can always take away a valuable life lesson from even the most unpromising material.

Take, for example, my time as a receptionist at a GP's surgery in south-east London. As the first line of defence between the doctors and patients, I was fortunate enough to be paired on my shifts with Elaine, a woman of many years' experience in the field. Now Elaine was a woman of limited interests and her main topics of conversation were her fibroids ("I've gotta 'ave 'em done else they'll be coming out of me froat") and, once she felt she knew me well enough - roughly halfway through my second day - her predilection for sado-masochistic sex. It was like having an audible porn website for menopausal women. Her vivid turn of phrase ("blood clots the size of yer 'ead!") gave the days a somewhat hallucinatory edge, but the months spent at her side enabled me to perfect a poker face that has seen me through innumerable embarrassing social situations and increased my levels of tolerance - not to mention vocabulary - no end.

Then I worked in the bakery at the end of the road, which taught me a number of things about the workings of a small family business. Number one, the mother does the cleaning while the son and father vie to see who can press you up against the poppyseed split tins most often. Number two, it's the father. Number three, saying, "Is that a baguette in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?" does nothing to ameliorate the situation. Number four, sexual harassment is well worth putting up with when you are allowed to take home your own bodyweight in iced buns, jam doughnuts and Death by Chocolate cakes at the end of the day.

That was the job that taught me that feminism and pragmatism are often at war in the modern world, but at least I know which has the upper hand with me.

Then I was a shop assistant in the local bookshop, which is where I learned the truth of that famous statistic that 99% of people buy one book a year and hollow it out to keep their sandwiches in. I remember perhaps most fondly the conversation my manager, a man who started drinking the moment a new David Pelzer was announced so that he could sell copies to customers rather than beating them about the head for their execrable taste, had with the Darwinian rebuke of a man who came in looking for a book his girlfriend wanted.

I promised myself that I would never become so cruel and jaded. But then the day came when a customer walked up to the counter and gave, as his sole description of the tome he required, the word "rectangular". I don't remember much, other than being escorted from the building by the security guard from next door's Comet. But it was a salutary introduction to the dehumanising effects of working in the service industry, and since then I have always tried to ensure that my descriptions of goods I wish to purchase contain at least one identifying element within them.

The Idler's philosophy - that we are all mindless adherents to an outmoded Protestant work ethic, exhausted hamsters who need to jump off the corporate wheel and ask ourselves why we're putting ourselves through this - is one I embrace wholeheartedly, and I have the minimal income and sofa-induced pressure sores to prove it. But if crap towns can have their champions, so can crap jobs, and I salute all the employers who made me the gynaecologically-literate, diabetic, screaming lunatic I am today.